Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/591

Rh GIBBON His grandfather was a man of abilit.y, an enterprising merchant of London, one of the commissioners of customs under the Tory ministry during the last four years of Queen Anne, and, in the judgment of Lord Bolingbroke, as deeply versed in the “commerce and ﬁnances of Eiig- lantl ” as any man of his time. He was not always wise, however, either for himself or his country; for he became deeply involved in the South Sea Scheme, in the disastrous collapse of which (1720) he lost the ample wealth he had amassed. As a director of the conip:iiiy, moreover, he was suspected of fraudulent complicity, taken into custody, and heavily ﬁned; but £10,000 was allowed him out of the wreck of his estate, and with this his skill and enterprise soon constructed asecond fortune. He died at Putuey in 1736, leaving the bulk of his property to his two daughters ~—nearly disinheriting his only son, the father of the historian, for having married against his wishes. This son (by name Edward) was educated at Westminster‘ and Cambridge, but never took a degree, travelled, be- came member of Parliament, ﬁrst for Petersﬁeld (1734), then for Southanipton (1741), joined the party against Sir llobert Walpole, and (as his son confesses, not much to his f-.itlier’s honour) was animated in so doing by “private revenge” against the supposed “ oppressor ” of his family in the South Sea affair. If so, reveiige_. as usual, was blind; for Valpole had sought rather to moderate than to inflame public feeling against the projectors. The historian was born at Put-ney, Surrey, April ‘.27 (Old Style), 1737. His mother, Judith Porten, was the daughter of a London merchant. He was the eldest of a family of six sons and a daughter, and the only one who survived childhood ; his own life in youth hung by so mere a thread as to be again and again despaired of. His mother, be- tween domestic cares and constant inﬁrniities (which, liow- I ever, did not prevent an occasional plunge into fashionable dissipation in compliance with her husband’s wishes), did but little for him. The “ true mother of his mind as well as of his liealt.li ” was a maiden aunt——Catherine Porten ‘ by name—wit.h respect to whom he expresses himself in language of the most grateful remembrance. “ Many anxious an .1 solitary days,” says Gibbon, “ did she consume with pitient trial of every mode of relief and amusement. Many wakefiil nights did she sit by my bedside in tremb- ling expectation that each hour would be my last.” As cir- cumstances allowed, she appears to have taught him read- ing, writing, and arithmetic—acquisit-ions made with so little of remeinbered pain that “ were not the error corrected by analogy,” he says, “ I should be tempted to conceive them as innate.” At seven he was cominitted for eighteen months to the care of a private tutor, John Kirkby by name, and the author, among other things, of a “philosophical ﬁction,” entitled the Life of Aatomat/zes. Of Kirkby, from whom he learned the rudiments of English and Latin grammar, he speaks gratefully, and doubtless truly, so far as he could trust the impressions of childhood. With reference to Autonm!/res he is much more reserved in his praise, deny- ing alike its originality, its depth, and its elegance; but, he adds, “ the book 1S not devoid of entertainment or in- struction.” In his ninth year (1746), during a “lucid interval of I comparative health,” he was sent to a school at Kingston- upon-'l'lianies ; but his former inﬁrmities soon returned, and ! his progress, by his own confession, was slow and i1iisatisfac-. tory. “ My timid reserve was astonished by the crowd and , ti'nnult.of the school; the want of strength and activity disqualiﬁed nie for the sports of the play-ﬁeld. . . . . 13y the common methods of discipline, at the expense 1 The r-eleb‘rated ‘:1lllﬂTl1 Law had been for some time the private tutor of this 1Lll‘3-l-Ll (.ibbon,_ who 15 supposed to have been the Qriginal of the rather clever sketch of “ F latus " in the Serious Call. 5 43 of many tears and some blood, I purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax,” but manifestly, in his own opinion, the Arabian z'z'_r/lets, Pope's Homer, and Dryden's l'i'r_r/il, eagerly read, had at this period exercised a much more powerful inﬂuence on his intellectual development than I’liae- drus and Cornelius Nepos, “ painfully construed and darkly understood.” In December 1747 his mother died, and he was taken home. After a short time his father removed to the “rustic solitude” of Buriton (Hants), but young Gibbon lived chieﬂy at the house of his maternal grandfather, at Piitiiey, where, under the care of his devoted aunt, he developed, lie tells us, that passionate love of reading “which he would not exchange for all the treasures of India,” and where his mind received its most decided stimulus. Of 1748 he says, “ This year, the twelfth of my age, I shall note as the most propitious to the growth of my intellectual stature.” After detailing the circumstances which unlocked for him the door of his graiidfather’s “tolerable library,” he says, “ I turnerl over many English pages of poetry and romance, of history and travels. Where a title attracted my eye, without fear or awe I snatched the volume from the shelf.” In 1749, in his twelfth year, he was sent to Vestmiiister, still resid- ing, however, with his aunt, who, rendered destitute by her f-.ither’s bankruptcy, but unwilling to live a life of depend- cnce, had opened a boarding—house for Westminster school. Here in the course of two years (1749-50), interrupted by danger and debility, lie “painfully climbed into the third form ;” but it was left to his riper age to “acquire the beauties of the Latin and the rudiments of the Greek tongue.” The continual attacks of sickness which had re- tarded his progress induced his aunt, by medical advice, to take him to Bath ; but the mineral waters had no effect. He then rcsidetl for a time in the house of a physician at Winchester; the physician did as little as the mineral waters; and, after a further trial of Bath, he once more returned to Piitiiey, and made a last futile attempt to study at Westminster. Finally, it was concluded that he would never be able to encounter the discipline of a school ; and casual instructors, at various times and places, were pro- vided for him. Meanwhile his indiscriininate appetite for reading had begun to ﬁx itself more and more decidedly upon history ; and the list of historical works devoured by him during this period of chronic ill—healtli is simply astonishing. It included, besides Hearne’s Ductor Ilistoricus and the successive volumes of the U7z2've7'sczl I[z's(or_2/, which was then in course of publication, Littlebury’s Ilerodolus, Spelnian’s A'enop/eon, Gordon’s Tacitus, an anonymous translation of Procopius; “many crude lumps of Speed, Ilapin, Mezeray, Davila, Machiavel, Father Paul, Bower, &c., were hastily gulped. I devoured them like so many novels ; and I swallowed with the same voracious appetite the descriptions of India and China, of Mexico and Peru.” His ﬁrst introduction to the historic scenes the study of which afterwards formed the passion of his life took place in 1751, when, while along with his father visiting a friend in Wiltshire, he discovered in the library “a common book, the continuation of Ecliard’s Roman Ilistory.” “ To me the reigns of the successors of Constantine were absolutely new ; and I was immersed in the passage of the Goths over the Danube, when the sum- nions of the dinner bell reluctantly dragged me from my intellectual feast.” Soon afterwards his fancy kindled with the ﬁrst glimpses into Oriental history, the wild “ barbaric” charm of which he never ceased to feel. Ockley’s book on the Saracens “ first opened his eyes ” to the striking career of M-ahomet and his hordes; and with his characteristic ardoiir of literary research, after exhausting all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the